Article 15 also says, “No citizen shall, on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them, be subject to any disability, liability, restriction or condition with regard to access to shops, public restaurants, hotels and palaces of public entertainment; or the use of wells, tanks, bathing ghats, roads and places of public resort maintained wholly or partly out of State funds or dedicated to the use of the general public.”

However, in the shadow of the Coronavirus lockdown, hate speech, social and economic boycott of Muslims has gained speed and strength as various administrations have looked the other way. The anti-Muslim Communal virus 2020 has taken root and has already caused major damaged to India’s secular fabric. Here are a few instances that just show the tip of the Communal hate-wave now growing rapidly.

• Ahmedabad Gujarat. Civil Hospital split COVID19 wards on faith

Civil hospital in Ahmedabad, which had earmarked 1,200 beds for COVID-19 patients, segregated its wards on the basis of religion, shocked everyone. Muslim patients were sent to one ward, and Hindus patients were sent to another. 
 

• Nagpur, Maharashtra: “These people are not like you and me”  

Even as the Prime Minister himself remained silent on the communal hate being spread against Muslims in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, some from his party continue adding fuel to the fire. In Maharashtra, a BJP MLA Krushna Khopde ‘demanded’ that the Indian Army be deployed in Muslim Dominated Satranjipura , area in Nagpur.  Krushna Khopde claimed that “a lot of coronavirus cases” had been reported from that area and the residents were “not cooperating with civic officials and police” towards the containment efforts.
 

•  Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh: “You people have created this problem.”

Open taunts at a Muslim woman. Writer, activist Natasha Badhwar shared on Medium, and Facebook, how her sister-in-law was taunted by a gas cylinder delivery man, even though she asked about his well being. She felt empathy for him as work under the national Coronavirus lockdown is challenging, and asked in solidarity: “it must be harder than usual for you to get your work done in this atmosphere.” “What are you saying,” answers the delivery man, dismissing her expression of solidarity. “You people are the ones who have created this problem.” 
 

• Greater Noida, UP: “Is food being delivered by a Muslim?”

Human Rights group Karwan e Mohabbat are distributing food kits and meals to people stranded without work and means to feed themselves during this lockdown. While readying a food ration delivery,  a team member was asked, “Is the person who is coming Hindu or Muslim?” The volunteer, who is also a human rights lawyer said it was not the time to think like this and why should it even matter? The volunteer told them that the rations will be delivered by a Muslim. The group of upper caste Hindu men refused to accept the free ration from a Muslim volunteer.
 

• Shastri Nagar, Delhi: “We will not let any Muslim enter our lanes”

A group of men residing in the middle class colony of Shastri Nagar, decided to as vendors their religion, warning the ones they suspected of being Muslims, against entering the colony “you will get beaten with sticks otherwise”. He proudly shares how he “caught” a vendor who called himself Misra, but “turned out to be Muhhamed Imran. “We beat him up and chased him away, ” he posted the hate video on Facebook and has also asked everyone else in the city to follow his violent example saying, “If he is a Musalmaan, chase them away.” Delhi Minorities Commission chairman, Dr Zafarul-Islam Khan wrote a sternly worded letter to the Commissioner of Police, Delhi, alerting him to this video.
 

• Communal reportage by Rahul Kanwal: “Madrasa Hotpots: India Today Investigation” 

Rahul Kanwal’s show was blatantly Islamophobic, communal and misinformed. The ‘sting operation’ carried out in Madrasa gave an impression that children were “kept hidden” and were at risk of contracting COVID-19. However, madrasas serve as hostels for poor, destitute and orphaned children. This important piece of information appears to have been conveniently skipped in the show. As part of its ongoing campaign against communal hate, Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) has sought accountability from India Today for running this hate campaign against minorities terming ‘madrasas’ as Covid-19 hotspots. 
 

• Buldhana, Maharashtra: Muslims face social boycott 

Messages go viral on social media and whatsapp telling people to boycott the entire Muslim community because 16 members out 17 Covid19 cases belonged to the faith. People were urged not to buy from Muslim owned shops. Muslim shoppers were turned away. And according to a report in The Times Of India, medical attention was denied to, or delayed for Muslim patients. A doctor from Raipur village in the district was also booked for spreading hate messages.
 

• Delhi Police on arresting spree even during  COVID 19 lock down 

Over 800 arrests have been reported from North-East Delhi so far. According to an Indian Express report the Ministry of Home Affairs had  issued a fresh directive to continue investigations in the wake of the Coronavuris lockdown. 
 

• North East Delhi, Pogrom survivors face Coronavirus insults

Many cases in North East Delhi where after the riots Hindu landlords turned Muslim tenants away. Muslim business were lost. Freelance beautician had recalled how  she was asked not to go to Hindu clients’ homes. After the Coronavirus began spreading in the district, the discrimination againt the Muslim residents have only increased. 
 

• North West Delhi: Hindu Jats are telling the small Muslim minority in the two villages (Harewali and Qutubgarh) that from now on they must live according to Hindu customs, otherwise they will be thrown out of the villages.

• In North West Delhi, Muslims asked to live like Hindus

Hindu Jats of the are have allegedly been  telling the small Muslim minority in the two villages (Harewali and Qutubgarh) that from now on they must live according to Hindu customs, otherwise they will be thrown out of the villages
 

• Delhi University

Various teachers of Delhi University posting virulent hate message against the Muslim community on their facebook page. The Delhi Minorities Commission had to take up the issue. 
 

• Delhi: “Muslims are not, or should not be, equal”

Senior BJP member and lawyer Subramanian Swamy in a video interview to Vice News has said things like, “They are not an equal category… Muslims are not, or should not be, equal is not an uncommon sentiment.”
 

•  Mahoba, Uttar Pradesh: Vegetable sellers face discrimination

Five vegetable sellers in Uttar Pradesh’s Mahoba district have submitted a written complaint to the authorities that they were abused and stopped from selling their goods by a group because they are Muslims. One of the vendors told NDTV that the group accused them of spreading coronavirus and said they were members of Tablighi Jamaat — the Islamic sect linked to hundreds of COVID-19 cases across the country. The sellers were abused, and asked to leave the village, they said. Some other people came and said ‘these people are Muslims don’t buy from them’,”     
 

• Rajasthan: Doctor refused to admit pregnant woman because she’s Muslim

Her baby child died soon after delivery. The government hospital in Rajasthan’s Bharatpur has come under the scanner for allegedly refusing admission to pregnant Muslim woman citing her religion leading to her child dying soon after the delivery reported India Today.
 

• Arunachal Pradesh, Muslim Truckers Beaten Up

Kurung Kumey district Food and Civil Supply Officer Chukhu Jirjo said the Muslim ruckers, who unloaded rice at Koloriang, were beaten up by a group of men reported  News18. The truckers led their vehicles behind and fled to neighbouring Assam, leaving their vehicles behind.
 

•  Bhangarh, Una district, Himachal Pradesh: Muslim commits suicide after he is targeted over COVID-19

After he returned from quarantine, 37-year-old Mohammad Dilshad, took his life by first slashing his wrists and then hanging himself to death in his home on April 5, reported The Quint. The villagers had called the police on him, and taunted him. Dilashad went to the hospital  himself to get tested for Covid19. His reports were negative, but he had faced too much mental trauma in his own village, and ended his life.

The post Whither Article 15? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Movie Poster

The film, set in Uttar Pradesh is supposedly based on the Badaun gang-rape and murder. Aesthetics is how the film lures its viewers: A pretty, light-skinned Brahmin boy, so earnest, so bewildered by caste hierarchy who is as clueless as the research team for the movie is the hero and saviour. Khurrana’s character, Ayan is after all an IPS officer. I wonder how he even passed his UPSC exam without hearing about the caste phenomena that befuddles him for most of the film? But this pales in comparison to the other missteps in the film.

As I watched the film amongst an audience who hooted, clapped and cheered, all I could feel was horror and disbelief. How could this pass muster with the audience? How could a sick exhibition of violence and brutality get mistaken for awareness? How can a movie on caste discrimination in which dalit bodies exist only as props to be raped, murdered, lynched, beaten and shredded with bullets be okay? Dalit characters bow and scrap. They clasp their hands in servile supplication, either begging for mercy or in gratitude. As if fetishised oppression is the only way to convince the savarna viewer about social justice, they are denied agency and assertion, they are denied their humanity. They are even mostly denied dialogues unless they are meek wide-eyed beseeching to the powerful.

The portrayal of dalit culture: protest songs, rallies and “Jai Bhims” betray the writer who has never heard and seen any of those. It dehumanises and humiliates the very people in whose favour the film has supposedly been made. Clothed as gritty cinema, it denies dignity. It is inebriated by its own righteousness. The sheer breadth of its ignorance, matched only by caste-blind entitlement, is stupefying.

How does this industry create the impression that it has dared to go into murky places that no one else has? How does Bollywood and its viewers exist even today, not knowing the fearlessness of many in “regional” cinema? Pa Ranjith, Leena Manimekalai, Amshan Kumar, Mari Selveraj – these are directors from just the Tamil film industry who deal with caste issues sensitively and powerfully. There are others in other Indian languages. How does Bollywood crudely play catch-up and yet convince a certain audience that it is leading from the front?

Article 15 is trapped between a rape and murder cop mystery and giving ham-fisted lessons in casteism. It chooses a macabre Nordic drama aesthetic with matching music and lightening, further distancing the atrocities from reality. The framing of the scene where two minor girls are found hanging by their necks from a tree as a restless fog swirls around them, while the music is adequately chilling, says that their deaths mean nothing without the cinematographic drama. It says simply that these deaths are worth less in their ability to move the viewer in comparison to what some good computer work could accomplish. Anubhav Sinha himself acknowledges this cinematographic style, reminiscent of the HBO series True Detective, but fails to recognise that as a problem. This, when the 2014 Badaun case led to immense trauma for the family and the CBI stalled the investigation. When the photograph of the two girls hanging from a mango tree was already hungrily consumed by media and viewers alike. Even without the cinematic drama, the photograph is shattering. It should never have been made public.

Characterisation too continues to be problematic throughout the film. The dalit constable in the station is the source of comedy, portrayed as dim-witted and ignorant but an essentially good soul. It recalled, forcefully, the racist “humour” of 30s American cinema that routinely used black-face or included black characters only for the jokes or as simpletons. The corrupt brahmin police officer played by Manoj Pahwa for all his casteism is so reduced by the villainy of his role, that he’s just a grunting, barely coherent creature filled with malice, stomping about as he rages at subordinate officers. It’s hardly surprising that the audience clapped in unison when he is slapped dramatically by the constable. One wonders if the same people would be equally thrilled about a brahmin being slapped by a dalit man in real life. Not all caste oppressors look and act like cine-villains.

The dalit constable in the film was apparently played by a brahmin actor. The caricature version of someone modelled on who appears to be Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad was allegedly played by a baniya actor. But the role of a sanitation worker rising out of a septic tank, covered in black sewerage was reserved for a real life worker. The director has defended the scene saying the set had been created by the production designer and that the sewage was artificial.

In the scene, the man rises out of the sludge, black liquid waste clinging to him, and wipes his eyes. The music soars. Everyone is supposed to be obligingly moved. I just felt sick. Do we really need a suitable background score and a towering theatre screen to see the inhumanity in the jobs of sanitation workers? Are the deaths and the actual news not enough? Is the fact that it continues to exist not enough? If the movie is about oppression, what is the director saying if not that a flesh and blood dalit’s sole role in a film about his community is to clean fake sewers for an audience? Is that his “aukaat” — a word the movie throws around relentlessly? This is when I also have to point out that the film in setting the events in a village in UP, reitetrates the urban myth that caste is only a problem in rural India. 

Of course, the legally aware viewer is wondering why the filmmaker has only just discovered Article 15 of the Constitution. Article 15 promises equality, but Article 17 of the same constitution specifically abolishes “untouchability”. Yet, these were not enough. The 1955 Untouchability Offences Act was amended in 1976 as the Protection of Civil Rights (PCR) Act. This act continues to exist. That too was not enough. That is why we have the Prevention of Atrocities against SCs and STs Act (PoA), 1989, that was amended in 2018. An act that has been in the news only in the last couple of years for the several changes it went through. An act under which such a case as depicted in the movie would be registered, if only the savarna hero knew his pretend job.
 
Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum
 

The post Article 15: A Spectacle of Dalit Oppression appeared first on SabrangIndia.

As reported in the ANI, the BSOI, through its National Organising Secretary, Nemi Nath Chaturvedi, filed a writ petition (civil) in the SC on Thursday to stop the release of the film and mentioned the matter for an urgent hearing. In its petition, BSOI contended that the film, based on the horrific 2014 Badaun rape case, has various objectionable dialogues, spreads rumours and caste hatred in the society based on a “false and concoted story.” The petitioner further argued that the film violates the true spirit of Article 15 and 19(1) of the Constitution of India. It also stated that naming a film on an Article of the Constitution without the approval of the government, for personal or commercial gain, is illegal and violative of section 3 of the Emblems and Names (Prevention of Improper Use) Act, 1950.

The petitioner further pleaded that the certificate issued by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) granted to Benaras Media Works Pvt Ltd should be cancelled and the release should be stayed as it will lead to “public disorder, incitement to offence, among different castes against each other,”
In a huge relief, the SC refused to hear the matter on an urgent basis and didn’t even give another date for hearing. 

The BSOI has been protesting against the film release since past 15 days and its members have been visiting various theatres to stop the screening midway. “We the members of Akhil Bhartiya Brahmin Samaj are protesting against this film ‘Article 15’ from last 15 days. The director of the film says a movie is made to showcase malpractices of the society, which is true, but such movies should be made on true incidents. This film is made on the claims that it is based on Badaun gang-rape incident but the truth is none of the members of the Brahmin community was involved in that incident. In this film the makers have portrayed our community as the cruel and aggressive group who oppresses the Dalit community, because of which Brahmin Samaj is displeased,” said one of the members of the Akhil Bhartiya Brahmin Samaj.

In Nagpur, the Brahmin community protested outside a movie theatre by hitting posters of the films with footwear. “The film is showcasing Brahmin community as mean and rapists and that’s why we are revolting against it. Even after this, if the movie is released, Brahmin communities from around the country will lodge FIR against Anubhav Sinha,” said Manish Anand Trivedi, member of Brahmin Sena, Bhopal.

On Thursday, during the special screening of the film, actor Ayushmann Khurrana had said, “Today Anubhav Sir (Anubhav Sinha, director) has issued a statement in which he has cleared that the movie is not against any community.”

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